In mobile wireless communications systems base stations and one or more wireless terminals communicate with each other. Typically, a base station is associated with a so-called cell and communicates with one or more wireless terminals within the area of the cell. In so doing, it is necessary for the base station to identify wireless terminals within its associated cell. Indeed, the wireless terminals may move from one cell to another. This movement may occur without a particular wireless terminal informing the base station associated with a cell that it has left the cell coverage area. Moreover, any particular wireless terminal may have run out of power or has moved into a so-called coverage hole within a cell and, therefore, may not be able to communicate with the current base station associated with the cell. Since, the base station has devoted some system resource, for example, bandwidth and/or state variables, to communicate with each wireless terminal, the unexplained loss of communication with the wireless terminal implies that the system resource is being unnecessarily used, i.e., wasted. Thus, it is in the best interest of overall system efficiency to recover use of the wasted resource. One way of doing this is to determine if the particular wireless terminal can communicate with the base station. An attempt at realizing this determination is for the base station to transmit a paging message intended for the particular wireless terminal. If the wireless terminal receives the paging message, it transmits a paging response message back to the base station. Lack of such a response message being received by the base station indicates that communication with the wireless terminal has been lost. In known wireless communications systems, this interaction between the base station and wireless terminals involves setting up communications links between the base station and wireless terminals through a random access process. Unfortunately, this process can turn out to be quite costly in terms of system resource utilization.